Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
force him to have an appointment with me”, but also “people are avoiding (me)”.
These relations were a significant medium to achieve his tasks. What were 'his
tasks'? Actually, I found it was not easy to differentiate between the tasks he set
for himself and the ones his job required. Or, did his job require him to set his own
tasks?
In the early afternoon we went through the offices of the student union to
gather materials and bring them to recycling points. At one of the points he recog-
nised that the recycling container was 'polluted' with matter which was not sup-
posed to be there. So he got the matter out and brought it somewhere else. Was
this a required task? It probably was not part of his job description, but of his
stance towards environmental issues: Julian had - and used his -
agency
to change
this detail to improve the environmental situation. Later that day he was talking
with his boss about energy saving in one of the clubs of the union. The boss made
clear where Julian's agency ended: “night clubs (are) designed to waste energy”.
Four years later, Julian remarked in a written comment on this paper: “Exactly! It
is not the remit of an environmental manager to close down the organisation for
which he works for”.
In my analysis of the day I became particularly interested in Julian's agency in
setting up a recycling network. He had the task to organise glass recycling for one
of the facilities of the student union; a task which he approached by getting in
touch with recycling companies. From them he learned that the amount of glass
'waste' was not enough for the recycling companies and hence they would not
come 'just' for the student union facility. In this situation he could have said:
“Well, I don't get enough glass and therefore recycling does not work.” Instead,
however, he got in touch with other producers of glass 'waste', pubs, and managed
to get them into a joint glass recycling scheme. In Bourdieu's terms (which I will
sketch below) he would do this if it is reasonable to him. Whether something is
reasonable depends on the situation consisting of inner stances and external cir-
cumstances. I aim to open up whether his setup of the recycling scheme can be
considered as Ecological Modernisation (EM). The rationale of Julian's action
will remain unknown. What we can investigate, however, is how he used the
agency he had at hand. Hence, we shall turn towards approaches of social theory
to describe his action, what it encompasses and its limits.
22.3 A Kaleidoscope of Social Theory
The aim of this section is to introduce three perspectives which seem useful to
problematise limits of managing the environment. On the one hand Ecological
Modernisation Theory is good at sketching the rationality underlying hegemonic
discourses and practices of environmental management. On the other hand the par-
tially conflicting perspectives of Pierre Bourdieu and Actor-network theory allow
situating management practices in their relations. I do not give full analyses of ei-
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